Inner-city Detroit might be the last spot you'd expect golf to crop up as a tool for pushing kids to college. But that's the tool Renee Fluker latched onto a dozen years ago when she founded Midnight Golf. Three weeks ago, more than 400 high-school seniors, many of them from this city's roughest neighborhoods, showed up for the program's orientation session. Three hundred returned for interviews and 127 were finally accepted: That's all the program has room for. Notifications were sent out late on a Friday to avoid the disruptions that took place at some high schools in previous years among students Midnight Golf couldn't accommodate. Some required grief counseling.
The program isn't all about golf. Its main goal is to equip participants with the social and practical skills they need not just to make it to college, but to graduate. But golf is a big part of the program's popularity, despite Midnight Golf's inner city location and the economically disadvantaged background of most of the kids.
Renee Fluker, founder and executive director of Midnight Golf, in 2011 at Marygrove College, where golf serves as a launch pad for high-school seniors.Detroit Free Press/Zuma Press
"Before I signed up, I never gave golf much thought," said Deja Anderson, a Midnight Golf alumna now studying psychology at the University of Michigan. "Golf was something businessmen did, it was where rich people made deals." Now she keeps a set of clubs in her dorm room closet—all the Midnight Golf participants leave with their own set—and isn't intimidated by the game or its milieu. "I'd like to play more once I'm done with my studies," she said.
I met Anderson during Midnight Golf's graduation week last May. At the closing ceremony, attended by some 400 students, parents, friends and alumni, there was more hugging than at a family reunion.
Off to the side, Miss Renee as everyone calls Fluker, shook her head. "The contrast in maturity between these kids now and when they got here in [last] October, it never fails to amaze me," she said.
Midnight Golf meets twice a week in shared quarters at Marygrove College, a small Catholic liberal-arts school 8 miles from city center. On most days the first order of business is golf, on a 5-acre practice facility designed by blue-chip architect Tom Doak at no charge. The students spread out across a large putting green, a chipping green with a sand bunker, two lines of practice tees and a four-hole short course.
Only a few of the kids have ever gripped a club before. "By the end of the year, 60-70% of them are able to break 100," said Winn Moore, one of the paid PGA of America teaching pros, six at each session, who impart golf's fundamentals. In cold or wet weather, the instruction moves to hitting bays set up in a conference hall.
"Some of the kids each year turn out to be real naturals," said Fluker. But the main point isn't the game. Golf works as an anchor because the kids associate it with success. The game can teach intangibles like self-responsibility, strategic thinking, dealing with frustration and playing by the rules.
Fluker, who retired in 2010 after a 35-year career with the Michigan department of human services, saw the transformative potential of golf in the experience of her son, Jason. Inspired by Tiger Woods, he joined his junior high school golf team and, despite several setbacks, eventually earned a golf scholarship to Loyola University in Chicago. "Golf opened up the world for Jason," she said.
The program started small in 2001 at a community center as an offshoot of a safe-streets initiative called Midnight Basketball (hence the name). Fluker soon teamed up with David Gamlin, who runs a summer entrepreneurship camp for teenagers and helped develop the nongolf curriculum. The program moved to Marygrove in 2005. Funding comes partly from the state of Michigan, but Midnight Golf scrambles to come up with roughly half itself, through golf fundraisers and donations from individuals and local businesses. Some area corporations provide paid summer internships. The Birmingham Country Club and the Detroit Golf Club also help out.
The biggest contribution, however, is the time that the program's 30 or so adult volunteer mentors put in. Each pledges to come to every session all year, with an absolute minimum of absences, so that the kids learn to count on them and develop relationships that sometimes last for years. In small breakout groups at each session, the mentors and outside experts focus on business etiquette, interview skills, networking, resume writing, public speaking, personal budgets and applying for scholarships.
Midnight Golf dishes up a hot, family-style meal each night. "You should never underestimate the importance of the food," Fluker said. It also provides safe transportation home to students who need it.
Not all the participants come from underprivileged backgrounds. By design, some are high achievers, or "influencers," and others are kids who, in Gamlin's words, "could go either way" when it comes to college. "The idea is for the kids to create their own culture at Midnight Golf. They mentor each other. It's a way of leveraging peer pressure in a positive way," he said.
Each year the big event is a weeklong spring-break expedition called the Road Trip for Success. Three buses of students, staff and mentors head south to visit college campuses and play two or three rounds of golf. For many of the students, Fluker said, it is their first trip out of Michigan, their first time at fine-dining restaurants and their first time checking in and out of hotels. On the final night, everyone assembles for a coat-and-tie banquet at a high-end city club, complete with presentations and short dinner speeches by students.
"The road trip is where it all comes together. That's where the kids really become family," said Harold Curry, a former bank president who is Midnight Golf's board chairman. But the program's influence continues through college. Mentors and staff stay in touch, sending care packages and providing counseling, as well as the occasional emergency loan for things like expensive books. Michigan State University, where about 20 graduates go each year, has an active Midnight Golf student club on campus.
Since Midnight Golf began, 90% of its graduates enrolled in college (97% the last three years). According to the program's records, 94% of those who started college between 2003 and 2008, the last year for which figures are available, graduated.
Four years ago, Midnight Golf opened a second branch in Miami. It got off to a promising start, but it had to be suspended after two years when the director lost his regular job and had to move out of the area for his new one. "It was fragile. There are myriad components and they have to all be in place for this to work," Curry said. He believes, however, that the formula can be replicated. "There's really no magic to it, just a lot of hard work and passion and commitment."
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